In recent years, the media industry has expanded its horizons beyond traditional analog technologies. Audio, photographs, and even feature films are now being recorded or converted into digital formats. With this conversion to digital formats comes the ability of the media industry to provide Video-On-Demand (VOD) services to subscribers. VOD is similar to a traditional video rental service except that the video is delivered directly to the subscriber through a media delivery network such as a cable network.
In a conventional VOD delivery system, VOD services are provided to the subscribers via a delivery network. The subscribers are divided into service groups. A fixed bandwidth for delivery of VOD services is associated with each service group. The bandwidth the VOD server has available to provide VOD services is greater than or equal to the sum of the bandwidth of the service groups. The VOD server is provisioned with this bandwidth to ensure that a subscriber is never denied service because the VOD server does not have enough bandwidth. This increases the cost of the VOD server.
Therefore, what is needed is a method for optimally provisioning and managing the bandwidth of the VOD server.